


Get alone, get alone often

by OurLostKingdom



Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Although no real comfort here lmao, Angst, Because SHE WON’T LET THEM, Character Study, Don’t do this at home kids, Grief/Mourning, Hurt/Comfort, I love thasmin as much as the next gay but I needed a self-reflective narrative, Mention of past Doctors, One Shot, Self-Reflection, Spoilers, The Doctor is emotionally constipated, communication is important, of sort?, unhealthy coping mechanism
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-31
Updated: 2020-01-31
Packaged: 2021-02-25 10:20:48
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,267
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22494478
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/OurLostKingdom/pseuds/OurLostKingdom
Summary: She keeps tripping over herself.Her hands shake a little – she hides them deep into her pockets, creates a mask out of thin air, clenches her jaw and goes about her day.She doesn’t know how to keep the tremor at bay, she feels herself unravelling and she’s terrified she’ll slip any moment.(or the aftermath of meeting yourself isn't always great, especially when your other self is better than you)
Relationships: Thirteenth Doctor & Yasmin Khan, Thirteenth Doctor/Yasmin Khan
Comments: 17
Kudos: 73





	Get alone, get alone often

**Author's Note:**

> Following up the Fugitive of the Judoon I’m pretending there wasn’t the last-minute call at the end. 
> 
> It’s not super heavy but the angst is present because I really needed to address some issues. 
> 
> Even tho some of them might be my own interpretation of the character and the encounter with the other Doctor  
> Who was hot oooooh boi  
> Also Thirteen had me screaming the whole way. Incredible. I love Jodie.

**Get alone, get alone often**

_Attend the boxing matches, go to the racetrack,_

_Live on luck and skill,_

_Get alone, get alone often,_

_And if you can’t sleep alone_

_Be careful of the words you speak in your sleep;_

_And_

**_Ask for no mercy_ **

**_No miracles_ **

\- Charles Bukowski

_(The Doctor)_

She keeps tripping over herself.

Her hands shake a little – she hides them deep into her pockets, creates a mask out of thin air, clenches her jaw and goes about her day.

She doesn’t know how to keep the tremor at bay, she feels herself unravelling and she’s terrified she’ll slip any moment.

And so she runs on luck and skills, smiles even bigger, wider, a smile full of teeth, until that’s the only thing you can see on her face, and not the way grief buries itself around the hard lines of her mouth or how she keeps blinking. Like she’s not sure she’s entirely there but not sure that she _is_ at all either.

She talks big, laughs when a pea-brain of an alien, twice her size, violently purple and full of tentacles attempts to snap her in half, and runs even faster to where danger beckons her, headfirst, mind thankfully blank.

She’s reckless, in a way that might make the others feel that she’s becoming smug, or self-congratulating. She doesn’t care.

She runs on luck and skill, and half hope that her chance will turn sour.

The thing is.

The thing _is_. 

She can’t stop. She never will. The Doctor has always been the one who runs, the one who chase and is being chased, and she’s starting to feel that all this dancing in circle where she knows all the steps is going too fast for her. And yet there’s no way for her to stop running without feeling like she’s leaving half the universe behind. She thought she’d made her peace with it, agreed on the terms of the contract, and could keep on moving forward while waiting for every regenerative cell in her body to burn in exhaustion.

She thought she knew though, is the thing. But then here she came, her other self, the impostor, the Doctor Not Doctor, without so much of a shadow hiding in the lines of her face. It’s not her first rodeo either, she thinks bitterly, seeing another version of herself winning all the awards and the kiss after that. She has seen herself before, herself around the edges but entirely different where it mattered, someone else being kissed by the girl who had made the stars look a little less lonely in a sky out of reach and a lot more like something she could touch and love, however far.

She’s not so sure anymore.

And there she was again, a shadow of herself, “The Doctor” with Gallifrey in all its rage and glory hiding behind the self-assured way she held her gun. No companion at the moment, had she mournfully noticed, but not the last of her species either, however badly on terms they seemed to be. 

And the reminder that it is gone from her, gone _forever_ , but still out there, in another time or universe where she can’t possibly be, hurts _so much_. She keeps missing a breath, her hearts stutter in her chest, beating furiously but out of sync and she desperately tries to hold herself together.

How fair is that, to mourn all that is and ever was altogether, even another universe that is not hers to mourn in the first place?

(She’d tried to put the thought that perhaps the other Gallifrey had survived precisely because the other Doctor wasn’t her out of her mind, but it had kept coming back in flashes, and she’d given up trying to keep the shame at bay).

…

She feels the weight of Yaz’s stare and does her best to ignore it. The younger woman always had been the most perceptive of the three, but also the first one who refused to buy wholeheartedly the happy-go-lucky persona the Doctor carefully maintained around them.

And the thing is, again.

She didn’t lie per se. That’s who she was, who she had _wanted to be_ (and wasn’t that close enough, good enough?). The whole “laugh hard, run fast, be kind” sort of ordeal. And she had tried to keep it that way, freshly haunted by Grace’s death and the wounded look in Graham’s eyes. Tried to keep it at a whole happy-no-one-died kind of level of adventures (did not really succeed there either). Adventures were good, distracting. She’d work so hard to bring them where the universe had seemed at its kindest, except for when another corner of the galaxy came screaming for help. That’s all she had wanted them to see, because it was also all what _she_ wished she could remember, something else than a ball of string endlessly slipping through her searching fingers.

And hide the hurt, and pain, and utter despair, and all the screaming, past, present and future that kept ringing in her ears.

…

“Doctor?”

She blinks. They’re in the Tardis, back from investigating a haunted ship gone adrift, where ghosts had kept on rudely insisting on feeding themselves over her companion’s most cherished memories.

And she’s holding her chest like she’s broken a rib, bites her lips to keep herself from screaming in agony.

“Well done fam, that was a bit of a tricky one! Reminds of a time with Clara actually, with ghosts under the sea – well when I say ghost, they weren’t really ghosts _per say_ , more of a –“

She reigns herself back, shortening her panicked induced rambling, out of breath from the shock of summoning yet another painful memory in a place where she could no longer look at anything without being reminded of what she’d lost.

Trying to fill every space at the time, to keep her mind busy, outside of herself, not inward where everything seems short of collapsing on itself.

“Well that’s another story for another time actually. The Tardis has been begging me for some tinkering with the chameleon circuit, so I’ll see you gang in a bit?”

She doesn’t wait for an answer to push herself forward and far from the wall that had kept her steady and makes her way to the centre of the control room while trying to keep her legs from collapsing under her. The Tardis hums reproachfully, half angry with her whole masquerade and half worried for her mental state.

Don’t worry, she thinks softly caressing the navigation panel with all the gentleness she can muster. It’ll pass.

She tinkers absentmindedly with the harmonic generator while listening intently to the fading footsteps of her resigned companions and allows herself a quiet sigh before burying her head in her arms.

God, she’s tired.

And then she’s out in a flash again, coat and vision swirling around her, half running toward the library in spite of her wobbling legs. Grief had always made her angry, and anger keeps her running. But she needs a place to unfold herself and the library is the cosiest place she knows. It’s not just about memories for a start, or at least not hers only. Accordingly, it’s a good place to hide. For some reason, it’s also the only room the Tardis doesn’t constantly relocate when she’s having a fit (or doing damage control after a bumpy regeneration). Thereby the library remains, dutifully watching over every story the Doctor had taken care in recording, those she couldn’t witness, and the ones people kept dreaming for themselves.

And when it’s too much of an effort to breathe under the weight of her own narrative, she closes her eyes and pick someone else’s.

Here, among the ever-growing number of tales and legends gathering on the shelves, her own seems rather insignificant and the air makes itself a little bit lighter around her shoulder. Gone is the oncoming storm. In his place stands the traveller which is, in her defence, all she had ever wanted to be in the first place.

(But you can’t wander without learning a thing or two about being lost, and boy had she learned)

(Another grievance came with knowledge, an odd one she had not quite anticipated. The weight of things that are equally lost from you the moment you learn how brittle they are, how transient. And loss had changed her in ways she could not come back from)

Her relief doesn’t last long however, and soon enough she’s curling on herself on a sofa that had seen many other heartbreaks, fingers pressed against her ribs to keep all of her edges from spilling out and pouring blood over the soft blue of the carpet.

She shudders but she won’t sleep – she won’t sleep, she _won’t_. It’s worse there, shadows loom over her, familiar faces creased in agony and betrayal, leaving in their wake holes the size of a third heart in her rib cage.

She won’t sleep, she won’t. She’s too scared of what she might say, might feel, scared that she won’t be able to wake up and run away again.

And so she waits in that space, frozen, barely breathing.

Her eyelids keep fluttering indignantly, and somewhere in the back of her exhausted mind, she feels the Tardis dimming the lights and humming softly, trying to rock her to sleep, but she won’t.

_Why won’t they understand?_

That there’s no sleep to have, no peace to reach, no hand to hold? That everything is already dead in her eyes, and she can’t commit to that anymore. It’s not fair to ask her.

…

_An old face, with kind eyes and soft spoken, but such a similar mask. And waves of fiery red hair spilling on his shoulder. He struggles not to think of blood._

_“And there is so much, so much to see, Amy. Because it goes so fast. I'm not running away from things, I am running to them before they flare and fade forever. And it's all right”._

She bats her hand above her head, annoyed.

“Get out of my head”.

She feels the Tardis chuckling under her, with no bite to it, gentle affection swaying under what could only be called a smug purr.

_Feels a lot like running away now, my dear Doctor._

She swings her feet over the floor and tiredly makes her way back to the control room. These episodes of half wistful, half bitter contemplation usually leave her empty and cold, blurring minutes into hours. She’s grateful to hear to familiar rattle of Graham operating in the kitchen somewhere down the corridor.

The ache is still there, but easier to forget when she’s standing, even if she knows that she ultimately ends up running toward what she’s desperately trying to escape. Sorrow cling to her hands.

_A distinctly Scottish accent, a blur of white curls, and the pressing feeling that he has forgotten something. Something important._

_“It’s funny. The day you lose someone isn’t the worst. At least you’ve got something to do. It’s all the days they stay dead”_

“Shut _up_!”

There’s a stillness in the air for a moment, and she counts the seconds until Yaz’s worried voice pierces through the haze of her self-induced misery.

“You’re alright there Doctor?”

Yaz’s tone is kind, cautiously smooth and casual, but the Doctor can feel the questions burning her lips from where she’s standing. Yaz knows the episode with the Judoons has taken its toll on her friend but she won’t press now, as much as she wants to. Her patience is growing thinner than her respect for the ever-expanding boundaries of the Doctor, but she’s also become weary of her reactions. Poking the Doctor with a stick feels a little bit too much like tickling a sleeping dragon these days.

Even when said dragon is currently tripping over her own feet in her haste of getting away.

“Yes! Sorry! The Tardis is being a bit rude this morning, and I won’t have a rude Tardis if I have anything to say in the matter” the Doctor grumbles, angrily staring at the ceiling, and the Tardis swirls suddenly, outraged.

Nothing too forceful.

Nothing that would normally faze her.

She’s sent spiralling on the floor, headfirst.

She relishes in the few seconds where her mind goes blissfully silent, before the world comes rushing back in her ears and she groans. Wishes she didn’t have to get back up every time.

One knee on the floor.

Up before Yaz can get to her.

_She’ll die on you. She’ll blow away like smoke._

She laughs loudly, twirls around and smashes the materialisation button. 

…

And so it goes, days blurring into one another, fingers always slightly too out of reach for her companion to actually hold.

(Whatever she might feel, she knows she’s being selfish. And a liar. Keeping them from reaching out to her to spare them the moment of letting go is not a kindness. Not even to herself).

She tries not to think of another Doctor roaming a different universe with a place to get back to, however misfit they may feel. She keeps the jealousy at bay but can’t quite supress the tremor anymore.

And so she buries her hands in her pocket once more, and runs.

And she mourns, and mourns, and mourns all that is not hers to keep, silently, chanting names in the language of the dead.

_And when love came to us twice_

_And lied to us twice_

_We decided to never love again_

_That was fair_

_Fair to us_

_And fair to love itself._

**Author's Note:**

> I’m not entirely satisfied with it, but I thought I’d try.
> 
> I always feel like the Doctor is assumed to be handling grief much better by now, and I always thought it’s something you never really learn and need to confront every time you lose someone so here. I enjoy Thirteen showing emotional turmoil and trying hard to hide it too much, and Jodie is doing a great job so I had to. As a treat.  
> Also I was listening to the soundtrack of Face The Raven the whole time, and damn does it slaps. It’s also fucking sad.
> 
> Constructive criticism is deeply appreciated!  
> Also tell me if there’s bit where my English is meh (even just for structure!) because it’s not my first language, but I am trying :)
> 
> Come yell at me on Tumblr, I’m broken-jaw-of-our-lost-kingdom (a bit of a mouthful)


End file.
